Genealogies of Modernity

Dec 20 2023 12 ep. 54 mins 27

Genealogies of Modernity Podcast artwork

Season 2 of Genealogies of Modernity is a limited series from the Genealogies of Modernity Project and Ministry of Ideas. Each episode takes up a well-worn story about what it means to be modern and how we got here, and then challenges that narrative with recent humanities scholarship. Genealogies of Modernity illuminates lesser-known pathways to the present and unearths overlooked resources from the past for flourishing in the future. Genealogies of Modernity is a project of Beatrice Institute and Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, with major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For responses to the series, teaching aids, as well as artwork and videos, visit genealogiesofmodernity.org. Ryan McDermott, Producer and Genealogies of Modernity Project Director . Maria Devlin McNair, Senior Producer and Script Editor Jack Pombriant, Sound Designer Zachary Davis, Executive Producer (Ministry of Ideas) Special thanks: Dan Cheely, James DeMasi, Peter Fristedt, Max Glider, Jake Grefenstette, Darrah McDermott, Jess Sweeney, University of Pittsburgh Department of English and Humanities Center, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture Season 1 was written and produced by Ena Gojak and Owen Joyce-Coughlan with the support of Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture.

Society & Culture History

Copy RSS

Subscribe on Podcast Addict

The Enemy of Morality Is Not Modernity, It’s Me

Dec 20 2023 44 mins

The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” style. But these two writers shared a common problem: once modernity fractured society’s sense of

A Genealogy of Gun Violence

Dec 13 2023 51 mins

The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roots in the industrial revolution. Satia tells the story of British gun-maker Samuel Galton, Jr., who was called to task by his Quaker community for manufacturing rifles. As a professed pacifist, Galton had to wrestle with the large-sca

A Medieval Anti-Racist

Dec 06 2023 52 mins

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adorno, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the pre

Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico

Nov 29 2023 60 mins

Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations s

Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family

Nov 22 2023 45 mins

What is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the center of American identity and the source of American strength. But the idea of early American self-sufficiency is a myth. Caro Pirri tells the story of the precarious Jamestown settlement and how its residents depended on e

What Is Genealogy?

Nov 18 2023 45 mins

Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against the potential dangers of claiming modernity. Against the effort to erase the past, genealogy asserts that our ancestry will always be with us. Against the effort to master the past, genealogy reminds us that our descendan

What Is Modernity?

Nov 18 2023 36 mins

We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argu

Climbing the Mountains of Modernity

Nov 18 2023 46 mins

We all know many stories about how modernity came about. But what does it mean to be “modern?” This episode comes at the question through the test case of mountain climbing and rock climbing. Claims to becoming modern through climbing often point back to Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1336, a climb that made him, according to many historians, �

Chris Nygren – Giorgio Vasari and Genealogies in Art History

Oct 21 2019 75 mins

This week’s episode is based on Chris Nygren’s session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with him afterwards. Chris is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. He discusses the genealogy of art written by Giorgio Vasari in 16th century Florence, and the ways that it is taken to be normative in what constitutes �

Eileen Reeves - Galileo and Early Modern Science

Oct 21 2019 64 mins

This week’s episode is based on Eileen Reeves’ session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with her afterwards. Eileen is a professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She speaks to us about the new ground that natural philosophy was broaching in the 17th century, with an emphasis on Galileo, and questions the usefulness of the